Oregon Episcopal School student is Oregon's third SAT top scorer

View full sizeOregon Episcopal School student Hana Lee scored 2400 on the SAT. She is the third Oregon student in the Beaverton area to attain the perfect score Courtesy of Hana Lee

The search for Oregon's third, and final, top SAT scorer for 2012 is at an end.

Hana Lee, 16, a senior at Oregon Episcopal School in Raleigh Hills, stepped forward in December after reading a story in The Oregonian about a former classmate who hit 2400 on the college entrance exam.

The College Board, the company behind the SATs, noted three Oregon students achieved 2400 on the exams but did not name them and does not publicly release information below the state level.

Given that 18,800 Oregon students took the exam in 2012, the three could have come from anywhere, but all three attend private schools in the Beaverton area.

Lee joins Sunjay Mouli and Jeffrey Zhang, both Jesuit High seniors. Her interests differ from those of her top-scoring colleagues. They're science-oriented, and she writes novels.

Lee hasn't published any of her novels yet, but she's won plenty of awards for her writing, including a "Superior Writing" honor from the National Council of Teachers of English. She was one of four Oregon high school juniors last year to receive the certificate.

Lee wrote her first novel in second grade. She laughed a little as she recalled the story. "It was about two wolves," she said. They were brother and sister and went on adventures, including the kidnapping and rescue of one of the wolf siblings.

Reading sparked her interest in writing, Lee said. She read at a fourth-grade level in kindergarten and was bumped into second grade.

She moved from Michigan to Oregon when she was 9 years old and continued her writing.

She has completed seven or eight novels and has more than a dozen unfinished books. "I have a lot of ideas and not all of them work out," she said.

She has hopes for the novel she's currently writing and might seek a literary agent, "if it turns out as good as I hope."

Lee prefers working in fiction and described the novel as a dark urban fantasy. She didn't plot out the story as usual.

"I just started writing it," she said, noting, as all self-conscious writers do, that it's still a first draft and a lot could change.

Her father, Jason Lee, is a language translator and a martial arts instructor and her mother, Anne Russel, is a psychology student at Portland State University. Lee is the second of five siblings in the Beaverton family and the only girl.

She knows a career as a novelist would be a struggle, and she may have to follow another path for a while. Maybe something in international relations, she said, following her interest in Model United Nations at Oregon Episcopal School. "Writers need a day job," she said.